Читать книгу The Murderer's Maid - Erika Mailman - Страница 13

CHAPTER 6

Brooke

JULY 6, 2016

She has one rolling suitcase and a Rubbermaid tub, which holds all her possessions.

And here’s her new apartment. She always rents them furnished; she moves so often, it isn’t possible to haul furniture along with her. She has culled her property to the spare kernel of necessity, because the very word belongings intimates something she can never do: belong.

The apartment’s not bad. She called from Tucson and rented it unseen. In the Boston outskirts, it’s perhaps a little too close to where she grew up, but they always seem to find her, so it hardly matters.

She walks the small hall to inspect the sole bedroom with the dated mirror slider for the closet and the cheap carpet with pet stains. The bathroom is relatively clean, but she’ll reserve judgment until she runs the shower the first time to see if it drains well.

Back in the kitchen, with its flimsy cupboards and scratched linoleum, white gauze curtains lift in the breeze, bringing in a sweet, earthy smell from outside. Brooke has always loved this household drama, wind writ large, but knows it isn’t for her. Other people can relax in semitransparency, aware their shapes are visible to those in the darkness beyond . . . without caring. Others don’t mind that their voices carry into the yard beyond.

But this is not the case for her. She takes one last breath of the outdoors before closing and locking the window. She pulls her blackout curtains from her suitcase and swiftly threads them through the curtain rod, pulling them across the window as the gauze presses to the other side until completely superceded.

She inhales the blessed darkness of privacy. She can relax enough to unpack her small, curated collection of possessions.

Tomorrow, she’ll start her new job at the coffeehouse. The wages she earns being paid under the table are enough to keep her going. She did get a fairly decent insurance payout when her mother was murdered and converted it to traveler’s checks that she cashes only every now and then. She’s learned how to live with very little, studio apartments usually, with cinder-block walls. No cable, no wifi other than what she can catch through her neighbor’s walls. She shops at thrift stores on their 50-percent-off days. She does her own nails.

She always gets a library card and reads for free, and that is the key to her happiness. Brooke reads voraciously in the true crime genre. She takes strange comfort in these devastating tales, because when the killers come for her, it won’t be that bad. They didn’t torture her mother, and her death must have been fairly quick. It’s unsettling, though, that they taunted Brooke with the dinner plates, and that they now amuse themselves with a cat-and-mouse game. She hates that playfulness, the long stretch of years in which they’ve denied themselves closure. Because if they know where she is, why haven’t they already killed her?

They let her move from town to town, reinventing herself, taking a new name. Each time, she thinks maybe she’s gotten away, but then they eventually give her some sign, some indication that they’ve found her.

She’s learned to live with this slow chase, feeling temporary relief—like now—when she’s in a new city. She reads true crime to understand the motives, the thinking behind the pursuit . . . because maybe when they come for her for real, she’ll know what to say.

So she studies up, has read every Ann Rule book. She knows details of strangers’ murders with an encyclopedic memory, probably better than their own family members, loath to hear about and thus visualize their loved ones’ last moments on Earth.

She had started reading at the group home as a way to distract herself from the pain of her mother’s murder, a death so much less gruesome than those in these horrible pages. Her beautiful mom had been pushed off the road by a car that didn’t linger and which no one caught the plates of. A drunk driver, the police had concluded, but she knew better. Instead of murder, it had been called manslaughter. She hated that word. As a girl who grew up speaking both English and Spanish, she found it very strange. Slaughter was how animals became meat, and her mother was not even close to being a man.

In her mind’s eye, she could see the drivers as they’d looked four years ago, furious brothers who had to tick off the years until the eldest could get a driver’s license and exact revenge.

She worked hard to avoid thinking about her mother during her final moments and instead burrowed into other people’s tragedies: the abductions, tortures, the gut-based screams unheard by potential saviors—and sometimes heard but disregarded.

When she’s done unpacking, she opens her laptop and pulls up her Facebook account. Her profile picture is the default egg, but once inside her page, the cover photo is one of her and her mother, arms slung around each other, standing at the shores of Lake Havasu. Just the two of them, none of the spring break hordes.

Her mother, Magdalena, had been able to afford a week only in the off-season—their rental, though, still reeked of beer, tequila, and the dim but unmistakable scent of vomit. “A good cleaning could get rid of that smell,” her mother had said, and with a smile at Brooke, shrugged. The maid on vacation doesn’t clean.

Brooke’s thirteen years old in the photo, wearing a bikini whose flimsy top pieces meet with a large silver ring. “A keyhole,” the cashier had said when she rang it up. All that summer, Brooke had struggled with whether she invited the mental image of exactly what key might fit that hole. It was a summer that felt like sex still lingered on the beach, discarded by the spring break kids for any teenager to pick up like a sand dollar.

She’d looked critically at her mother’s figure in her own bikini that summer, a sky blue color that made her skin glow. Her Mexican skin was pre-tanned by God, Brooke had thought . . . and therefore so was hers—although one shade lighter. Her mother’s body was slim, muscular, curvy, all at once and in the right places. With perfect posture and a graceful stride, her mother walked the distance from their beach towels to the waves over and over. That summer, Brooke had looked at bodies hungrily, surveyingly, trying to understand her own place in the hierarchy of physiology.

As she looks below the photo, she sees a message waiting on her wall for her. Miguel had typed, “How’s the new place?

Miguel’s profile picture’s a joke, a detail of a large mural painted on a taqueria wall. It shows an Aztec warrior spiriting off a woman, breasts spilling out of her animal-skin dress. Miguel had chosen the warrior’s face to represent his own.

It’s okay, Brooke comments in the thread he’s started. I just kind of wish it had a soul.

You don’t want a place with soul, mija. That’s how you get a hotel like in The Shining.

So he’s online, or at least ready to jump on in response to his phone’s alert.

True. I’ll dial back my expectations.

Wish you didn’t have to keep moving.

I know. She pauses. Miguel understands; she had told him the story all those years ago when the two of them were co-prisoners at the GHAC, the “group home for abandoned children”—their nickname designed to find humor in their own scarred existences.

It’d be cool if someday you end up moving right into my city.

She starts to type something snarky, but her fingers stall on the keyboard. She’s wished this many times, that she was the sort of person who was free to live a normal life, who could renew an acquaintance with an old friend from her troubled teen years. She remembers all those hushed conversations on the back porch of the group home, her fingernails pulling paint shreds off the peeling floorboards and making a little pile of the results as they shared war stories in the battle of growing up. Who isn’t a survivor from the wreckage of childhood?

She types, Someday, I’ll do it.

I’ll put out the red carpet, baby.

No paparazzi, please, she types. You must know all the media attention is painful to me.

You just want to live your life, right?!

She snorts, and writes, Gotta log off now. Need some sleep.

Night, mija.

She closes Facebook and sits thinking. A joke about media attention, but she’s always felt the unwanted attention focused on her, keen and intent.

Furious, even.

When Brooke first met Miguel, she was fourteen, bewildered at the loss of her mother and the apparent dearth of relatives to take her in. She’d known her mom had come from a large family in Mexico, but her physical move to the United States had also been an emotional one. As far back as Brooke could remember, there were no phone calls, no packages, no sign that her mother had family she cared about. Brooke’s father had been a fling, and she hadn’t been permitted to know his name. The birth certificate, she saw when she had first studied it, reported his name as “Dirtbag”; someone had crosshatched it out but she could still discern it.

Brooke became a ward of the state and entered the foster care system, awaiting adoption along with Miguel. Some of the kids were orphans like her, while others—like Miguel—had parents, but worthless ones. Still a third group of residents was there for behavioral issues, rejected by their parents whether worthless or not.

It was hard not to think of the home as a sort of prison since they weren’t allowed to come and go as they pleased. Brooke had been a latchkey kid pretty much all her life; it was startling to be denied the right to step out for a Popsicle on a warm summer evening.

And summers were the worst.

When school didn’t dissolve a major portion of the day, the group home became a lame summer camp: the city pool twice a week, all day, so she was fried and sunblind by the end; stupid “matinees” on the smelly carpet of the home’s living room, each kid with a coffee filter full of popcorn, watching oldies on the VCR, itself an archaic electronic that somehow wouldn’t die and lay to rest its compatriot library of forgotten Hollywood goofs.

The upside, in her second year, was the arrival of Miguel. He’d been waiting for his parents to come home and make dinner, but they’d pulled to the side of the road for a fentanyl/heroin snack and overdosed. In the ambulance, the medical personnel found Miguel’s school photo in his mom’s wallet and dispatched police to ring the doorbell. His parents were alive but not going to be able to resume their parental duties for quite some time, so Miguel wound up sitting next to Brooke at his first dinner at the home, sticky spaghetti with mealy-textured meatballs.

“Is this really meat?” he’d cocked his head and asked her.

“It’s brown and ball-shaped, and that’s all I can say,” she’d answered.

They’d been close friends since then, not just because of their good behavior in the midst of proto-juvenile delinquents, but also because of their Mexican heritage and the lilt in their voices that informed the world so.

“I’m trying to train myself out of it,” she’d confided once when he caught her imitating the flat tones of the NBC anchor.

“Mija, never,” he’d said. “Your voice is too pretty.”

She and Miguel had aged out around the same time, she a few months earlier than him. They’d both taken the jobs and living situations offered them without thinking of refusing, he in Baltimore and she in Houston. College was never an option. Neither had the grades. With her mother’s insurance payout, she could afford community college tuition, but knew she’d rather dole out the money over her work life rather than blowing it in a few years.

She hadn’t wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a maid, so she was relieved when she was placed in a pop-up café as a low-wage barista, subsidized by a state grant.

The café got her for free in return for training her, and the grant paid her a meager salary, the idea being that when the grant ran out she’d move on to a genuine job with a gleaming entry on her résumé.

It was like her mother’s death all over again to lose Miguel. As the years passed, she saw him now and then, saving up money to take separate rooms at a Motel 6 somewhere between their two cities. They’d shyly bring each other up to speed by the pool separated from the big rigs in the parking lot by a chain-link fence. By the roar of the idling diesels, they’d sum up their years apart. The blue paint on the bottom of the pool peeled like a sunburn.

Romance never happened for them. She figured they both knew their friendship was a vital brick that kept their walls upright. They didn’t dare mess with the mortar. Life without each other wouldn’t have been worth living. Friends fight—and they did—but only lovers take savage joy in ripping the other from their life.

Brooke had tried to kiss him once at one of these reunions, and he’d put his hands tenderly on her face as he pulled away.

“Mija, if this didn’t work . . . ,” he had said.

“I know. But we’re never going to try?”

“To be honest, if a relationship failed, the friendship would, too. And that would kill me.”

“It would kill me, too.”

So they didn’t risk it, and he resumed being the brother she’d never had. In their world untethered by parents, they provided stability to each other.

They really did best on Facebook, relaxed, joking, unselfconscious. Under their fake avatars, they were each other’s only friend. They live-chatted pretty much daily, and her feed was a long row of funny and sweet things he’d said to her. He was her brick, her wall, her touchstone, her core.

The next day, Brooke shows up for her new job at the coffeehouse. She’s adjusted her speech and her clothing to look like the illegal immigrant she’s posing as, so she can be paid under the table. This is what she’s had to do to avoid being tracked: she changes her name every few years, moves, and finds a job where an employer is happy to look the other direction in exchange for paying a pittance.

With her looks and fluency in Spanish, it’s easy to pass as someone who doesn’t have a legitimate Social Security number. She has long black hair with a bit of natural curl at the ends, dramatic eyebrows, high cheekbones, and caramel-colored skin. Her body is lean and strong, thanks to not being a fantastic cook and not eating many meals out. She’s beautiful, but her understated way of dressing and behaving lets her easily be overlooked.

“Hi, Brooke!” her employer greets her. Jane is an older woman with gray hair braided into a Germanic-looking crown atop her head. She wears vests and approximately three huge silver rings per finger, an entire flea market table’s display on two hands. Jane had explained at Brooke’s interview how she felt sympathy for the plight of so many stranded Mexicans and she knew the government was wrong to impede immigration, so it was her own politically subversive act to therefore hire Mexicans even if they couldn’t appropriately and honestly fill out the I-9 form. She said nothing about how this then released her from the burden of paying minimum wage; no, it was all about screwing “the man,” not screwing the young woman in front of her.

“Going to be a busy day?” Brooke asks.

“It was . . . I had you come after the rush so it wasn’t stressful. This is Maria, and I’ll have her train you. You already know how the equipment works, but we have a few things we do differently from other places you might’ve worked.”

Maria, in a low-plunging tank top that gives a view of what Brooke suspects to be only the top 30 percent of a cresting serpent tattoo, gives her a friendly tour of the workspace, interrupted a few times by customers. Maria stands back and lets Brooke wait on them, and Jane gives an approving smile after each interaction.

After Jane leaves, Maria says in Spanish, “You have to be careful not to make her mad. She threatens to call Immigration.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. When you first meet her, she’s all ‘Oh, I love to help you; I know you had a hard life in Mexico,’ but what she likes is the power of knowing you’re illegal.”

“I’m not, actually,” says Brooke before she can help herself. Way to go. Contradict the fiction that’s keeping you safe.

“Oh, really? You’re working these shit wages because . . .?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“I bet. Anyway, don’t cross her.”

“Okay.”

Maria looks to the glass café front and grins. “Here’s our rush hour. Offices must be very difficult places to work; the workers stream out of them like their asses are on fire!”

Together they grind beans, scald milk, forge designs on the blank canvas of the latte foam. They press paninis and stock the sugars, ease a spatula into the pre-cut slices of a red velvet cake.

When the next shift arrives hours later, Maria leaves without saying goodbye to Brooke. It’s better that way—Brooke doesn’t want to get close to someone who will ask all the questions she’s had to rehearse answers to. But there’s still a pang at how their camaraderie had only been because they were on the clock together.